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Synthetic Benchmarks

AMD Athlon 5350 And AM1 Platform Review: Kabini In A Socket
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We begin with PCMark 8, which should help establish some expectations of the real-world testing.

The Home test is designed to reflect typical productivity workloads, including Web browsing, writing, gaming, photo editing, and video chat.

The Athlon 5350 beats Intel's Celeron J1900 by about 10% in the CPU-oriented version of the benchmark. But when OpenCL acceleration is enabled, AMD's new APU leads by much more. This shouldn't come as a surprise, given the Athlon's super graphics component and its compute potential.

The Athlon establishes an advantage in the Dhrystone module. Both processors are much more evenly matched in the floating-point-oriented Whetstone metric.

The Athlon 5350 fares well in the GPU-accelerated version of Sandra's cryptography benchmark, where plenty of memory bandwidth and AES-NI support are particularly useful. The Radeon shaders are also quite helpful for hashing.

3DMark's Cloud Gate benchmark gives us a synthetic peek into GPU performance. The Athlon carves out a fairly small advantage in the physics sub-test. However, its graphics score almost doubles the Celeron, which in turn affects the overall outcome.

 Futuremark's Peacekeeper Web browsing benchmark affords AMD another win, again in the 10-15% range.

Fair warning here: this synthetic benchmark was provided by AMD to demonstrate the company's new GPU-powered JPEG decoding acceleration, enabled in the Catalyst 14.8 beta 8 driver used for this review. Of course, we're most interested in how this feature works in the real-world.

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  • 0 Hide
    EdgeT , 9 April 2014 15:01
    They look like great little platforms. But a whole lot of people go the AMD route for homeservers (myself included). And just like me, a lot of people think that 4 SATA ports are just not enough. If it had like 8, like a lot of AMD motherboards I've looked at, I'd buy it in a heartbeat, and I bet a lot of people would.

    It's just convenience and cost efficiency, really, on the one hand, you've got 1 motherboard, CPU, tower, PSU, OS and IP adress for remote control and 8 HDDs and on the other, you've still got 8 HDDS, but 2 of everything else. Power consumption wouldn't make THAT much of a difference, since storage servers mostly idle, but the noise and size do take their toll.
  • 0 Hide
    EdgeT , 9 April 2014 15:10
    They look like great little platforms. But a whole lot of people go the AMD route for homeservers (myself included). And just like me, a lot of people think that 4 SATA ports are just not enough. If it had like 8, like a lot of AMD motherboards I've looked at, I'd buy it in a heartbeat, and I bet a lot of people would.

    It's just convenience and cost efficiency, really, on the one hand, you've got 1 motherboard, CPU, tower, PSU, OS and IP adress for remote control and 8 HDDs and on the other, you've still got 8 HDDS, but 2 of everything else. Power consumption wouldn't make THAT much of a difference, since storage servers mostly idle, but the noise and size do take their toll.
  • 0 Hide
    fergus1 , 15 April 2014 10:33
    For its price the AMD CPU is clearly a bargain, I thought it was a joke when I saw quad core CPUs for £30-£40! And running on 25W I think this just shows how much Intel are losing the low end CPU war. Don't get me wrong, I have an I5 adn wouldn't swap it for the world, but for >£100 Intel have very little to offer.
    I think the 1920x1080 and 1600x900 graph for Dota 2 are the wrong way round? And it would be good to also have had a graph for its performance with dedicated GPU.
  • 1 Hide
    subtitlefa , 18 April 2014 09:07
    I LOVE AMD :) 
  • 0 Hide
    Jakoob , 14 May 2014 22:40
    Im a bit worried about the test of power consumption. Both Athlon 5350 and J1800 are idling around 30 W, which seems too much compared to other tests around the world. Both should be somewhere around 10-15 W for idle.

    I think the problem is the PSU. Using 850W XFX is total overkill and even being certified as gold class, it has high efficiency at 20% load, which is 170 W. Therefore the PSU is used in non-efficient area and can simply add 15 - 20 W extra to the final power consumption.

    Next time maybe borrow PicoPSU and some efficient brick.

  • 0 Hide
    leeb2013 , 16 June 2014 00:11
    yeah, my Xeon uses <5W idle and 35-40W loaded.